Dan

Do you own any 16mm or 35mm film prints? Are they feature films, theatrical trailers, or something else?
Or just 8mm/Super8 family films?

I don't... But I'm curious if anyone here has one or more in their collections. It's probably more of a thing for those who have had some part in the industry...

GoldenJCJ

I don’t. But as much as I like the idea of owning 35mm or 16mm, I think the reality would be that they would end up being dust collecting clutter that I would never use.

Alan Smithee

I have most trailers, many never used with leaders and tails still on, from roughly 1992-2001. I kept at least one of each during my time as a projectionist. I have a full print of the 1976 sketch comedy movie Tunnel Vision which I traded some trailers to a friend for (ran it at the theater I worked at after hours), and a XXX feature called The Love Syndrome from an Ebay seller which I've never gotten to see. I have a projector and platter in storage, just awaiting when I have someplace to set them up though it won't be plug-and-play then.

Have lots of stuff on 16mm, mostly educational films, only full movie is The 400 Blows and I got Deep Throat on one reel a few weeks ago which I haven't screened yet.

Mike86

I think the idea of owning a real print of a film is cool, but realistically I probably would never use it. Also I don’t think it would be worth having a projector for if you only had a small selection of films.

E Unit

I have a lot of 35mm trailers from back when I was a projectionist and used film in projectors. I also have the 2nd reel of film of the Disney movie The Program that was edited and destroyed. We got the updated reel with a letter demanding the reel be destroyed immediately since it had the highly controversial scene of the high school football guys laying in the middle of a highway getting an adrenaline rush. After some kids in real life imitated it and one got killed, Disney quickly took it out. Of course I kept it, but haven’t played it for some years.

rbrown498

I've got two 35mm prints, both bought from eBay: Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, an early '70s British film also known as The Exorcism of Hugh, and Hillbillys in a Haunted House, a film with which I have a strange fascination. I don't have the equipment to screen them; I bought the first one because I thought that it'd be cool to own a 35mm print, and I bought Hillbillys because I love the film so much. Unfortunately, it also has a terminal case of vinegar syndrome.

I also have a pretty big collection of 16mm features, again, all bought off of eBay:

Agent for H.A.R.M.
Alamo Bay
Baby Blue Marine
Becket
Best Friends (1975)
Brand New Life
Buchanan Rides Alone
The Burglars
Cactus in the Snow
The Cheyenne Social Club
Christiana
Count Yorga, Vampire
The Cracker Factory
Cry for Happy
Cry of the Banshee
Daring Game
Doc Savage—The Man of Bronze
Dr. Phibes Rises Again (incomplete – 55-minute cutdown)
Dreams of Glass (incomplete – Reels 2 and 3 only)
Duffy of San Quintin
Fearless Frank
Friendly Fire (Reels 3 & 4 are too warped to make it through the projector, though)
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
The Girl in Room 13
The Golden Moment
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon (seems to be only Reel 2, but it has the studio logo at the head--it's an oddball print for sure)
The Gypsy Moths
Lady Ice
Live a Little, Steal a Lot
The Mackintosh Man
Man Friday
Mr. Magoo at Sea
My Six Convicts
The Mystery of Thug Island
No Way to Treat a Lady (with burned-in captions for the hearing-impaired)
O. Henry’s Jimmy Valentine
One Night in Lisbon
Otley
The Outcasts of Poker Flat
The Oval Portrait
The Purple Plain
Rollover (incomplete – Reels 2 and 3 ONLY)
Slither
Spirits of the Dead
Spy in Your Eye
Those Fantastic Flying Fools
The Virgin and the Gypsy
The Way We Were
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Your Money or Your Wife

Few of them are pristine prints; most have gone red, and many of them are TV prints with everything offensive cut out. Still, my print of Alamo Bay is a former Films, Inc. rental print, and it's probably the best print that I own. I don't spend much on them, either; most average around $35 or so, and I've only ever spent more than $50 on four prints (including both the 35mm features). I've never spent more than $100 for a print.

I've also got scads of Super 8 films from when I collected as a kid, along with a ton of Blackhawk prints (mostly Laurel and Hardy shorts) that I've bought online. I've also got a couple dozen 16mm shorts, including several Warner Brothers cartoons.

Once the weather turns cooler, I'm going to invite some friends over every few weeks to watch the films on the patio. It should be lots of fun.

The unfortunate thing about collecting film prints is the space that they take up. I don't want to expose them to extremes of heat or cold, so they're all in the house, and they occupy a LOT of space. I suppose that pretty soon I'll start divesting myself of the ones that are in the worst shape or that I'm not overly fond of, but for now, I find it oh-so-cool and the culmination of a childhood dream to have so many actual film prints in my possession.

zyzzle

That was an excellent film! Congrats on owning a 35mm copy of it.

I do not own any 35mm films, but I would only "own" them in order to properly transfer them to an extremely high-quality digital format. Projecting them and buying all of the equipment would be super, super expensive, take up huge amounts of room, and prone to failure. On the other hand, buying 35mm films and *digitizing* them properly with a very high quality 35mm film scanner, at proper resolutions and bitrates (say, 4096x3072 or 3840x2160 and 500 to 1000 mbps bitrate) would preserve "permanently" an archival copy of those films which you could use and display in whichever manner you saw fit. You could probably fit an entire 90-minute film uncompressed at 24p, 4k resolution on a consumer-grade 18 or 20 TB hard drive. The drive could then be copied to many "backup" drives for preservation / archival purposes. These drives would outlast the 35mm projection equipment.

I'm certain that I could put many shoddy Blu-rays to absolute shame, with my digitalization setup. It would actually be within the realm of affordability. Acquiring the 35mm prints would get expensive, however...

zyzzle

Do like Rick Prelinger, or Skip at avgeeks, and please digitize your 16mm educational films at high resolution and high bitrates. Not Youtube. Keep these archival copies, as you'll be helping to preserve ephemeral film history -- at high quality. 1080p, encoded well at 30-40 mbps, with an AVC (h.264 codec) should preserve the grain structure and the resolution of analogue 16mm films very well.

Michael Corvin

Just a couple trailers. Braveheart and Stargate. Can't do anything with them but they're a cool collectible I keep on the shelf with all my movies.

All my friends worked at the theater around that time and hooked me up.

story

I have a small box of trailers and "let's go to the concession stand" type of fair from my days at the movie theater, as well. I don't remember what they all are, except one: Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition. That is the prize in my collection.

https://youtu.be/u73RjWjAbTc

bluetoast

I have a few assorted 35mm trailers.

Alan Smithee

Glad to hear the missing scene from “The Program” survives. I’m surprised they didn’t ask for the reel to be sent back. My theater only played that for 2 weeks, before the scene was pulled. After the last showing one night some dumb drunk kids went out and laid down in the street in front of the theater, a rather slow street with hardly any cars being around midnight. I had to laugh at that.

orangerunner

I still have a few 35mm trailers such as "Batman" (1989), Dazed and Confused, True Romance, Goodfellas, Fast Times at Ridgemont High etc which just sit on a shelf as a collectible.

I bought a 35mm print of Halloween back in 2001 which was great to own, knowing I had the original 35mm print of one of my favorite movies. It sat in my closet for 15 years and I eventually sold it realizing that 1978 film stock is prone to vinegar syndrome and I had better sell it to someone who would at least use it and hopefully store it in better conditions. I never had the means to play it and it just became a 50-pound collectible in my closet.

davidlynchfan

Only for the home decor along w/ my Goldberg Bros. reel. I believe it's a trailer for The Babe (1992 film w/ John Goodman).

John Galt

I had to read up on this since I remember watching the movie in theaters and the resulting controversy. I would have been twelve at the time and would ride bikes up to the theater with a couple friends when we were tracked out from school. I hardly remember watching R Rated movies in theaters at that age, but we must have gotten one of our parents to buy the tickets for us. And yeah, we also went and laid down in the middle of the street one night after watching the movie....but we were in a boring culdesac that didn't have any traffic after dark. We would have definitely jumped up had we seen headlights start to turn the corner.

According to Wikipedia, the only home media that ever had that scene in tact was a Hong Kong Laserdisc. You can also find the scene on YouTube.

lostkeys

Hi,

Would you consider selling your Deep Throat reel?

Thanks,
Louis

story

That is the creepiest first post I've ever read in my life.

Alan Smithee

And the answer is no- might trade it for a complete 35mm print of “The Program” though

Jaymole

I have asked for that plenty of times, just without the word "reel":

GoldenJCJ

Your “Johns” are so polite for asking.

John Galt

And he clearly doesn't know Alan if he's asking him to get rid of physical media.

Alan Smithee

Dragged out the projector and screen tonight to check out my Deep Throat print- turns out it's a censored version, likely made to get around some local obscenity laws. There's still plenty of stuff shown that would warrant an X-rating, but most of the, um, action is cut or obscured. There's a few weird split-screen effects and some scenes done in slow motion and stills. Don't know if this version's ever been on video but definitely a curiosity. The head is gone with some other leader spliced on, so no telling if it ever had the earlier shots of Linda getting into the car which is missing from most video editions. (Found this post again after Google-searching for any other mentions of a censored print. Closest I found was an article from the 70s saying Deep Throat was still playing at one theater but they were showing a censored version "with as much sex as a Walter Cronkite newscast." No telling if this is the same one.

Crocker Jarmen

Do you mean any shots of penetration are cut out, or are some still in, just cut back? I know that in Ontario, the regular theatres would show pornos, but they were censored versions that had any in-out-in-out shots gone. Still seems weird to me, that you're going to your local theatre to see the new movie, and last week all those seats were filled with a bunch of guys playing with themselves.

cultshock

That makes sense if it's a censored version of Deep Throat.


The only thing I have is a 35mm trailer for Kill Bill (I forget if Vol. 1 or Vol. 2) that I bought when I was on a huge buying binge of KB related items back when the films first came out (including a gigantic 8 foot by 5 foot theatrical banner from Thailand that I will never have a place to display).